Today, there is an overabundance of information. The Internet and private networks contain large amounts of data. The problem, though, is sifting through all the information to find relevant information. Different techniques have been developed to search for relevant information. However, searching techniques have concentrated on text based information. Consequently, identifying an unknown object is not supported appropriately.
Even conventional image searching techniques use text as the searching material. In conventional systems, textual information is usually manually created and tagged with the image. The textual information is the only searchable material for the image. There is no general and publicly available system to search for images themselves. Furthermore, conventional systems focus on locating images rather than providing identification information and knowledge about unknown objects.
Moreover, there is no system to help identify unidentified objects and persons without using a text search of some kind. In many situations, a user may see an object and is unable to identify it. However there may exist information that links the object or a representation of the object like an image to identification information about the object. For example, an encyclopedia links information and knowledge about a person like name, biography, historical information etc. to an image of the person. Typically, the image information in an encyclopedia is not indexed and requires a high effort when searching an image without having identified the corresponding object. Today, digital media like databases or the Internet provide large amounts of image data that is related to information and knowledge to the objects shown on the images. However, searching information and knowledge about an object using image representation is not supported. As a result, the user has no way to access the vast information stored on the Internet and private networks to help him/her identify the object. Therefore, a need exists in the art for an image-based identification system.